Two wheeled weather again and a note about Pashley kickstand

Oh, the bliss of a cool change! Yesterday it topped 40 here. Somewhere over 100 on the Fahrenheit scale. A haze hung over the sky; thankfully as full sunshine would have made it even hotter. We do often get a hot spell in spring, but it typically contains itself to one or two days of about 30 or 32, not a week of temps over 35 with punishing humidity. The only nice thing you can say about yesterday was that it wasn't humid. Anyway, all week it's been too hot to get out and get riding. We've had aims of getting up early and cycling before breakfast, but we've both had horrid broken nights of sleep all week. Despite the ceiling fan, it's been too hot and we've both woken during the night and felt wrecked the next day.

But last night the cool change came. It's 20 degrees cooler today, cloudy and a bit rainy. Penelope and I hit the road for a ride around and then a trip to the shops to pick up some veggies to complement tonight's roast chicken. I bought a lovely free range chicken at the farmers' markets at the weekend but cooking it in that heat was just unimaginable.

The wind was cool, the rain on and off but gentle and reviving. I usually hate riding or walking in the rain. I wear glasses and it's infuriating when they get covered in raindrops and I can't see properly. After the last week it was a delight to be out there with the cool rain caressing me. It was invigorating; I whizzed up hills with an energy I hadn't had for days.

I must make the most of it because we're flying to Melbourne on Thursday for a long weekend to visit my stepdaughter and her baby. I joke to my husband that I'm married to a grandfather. :-) His daughter is nearly twenty, and the baby coming up for 10 months, so we don't feel too ancient. There's a lot of cycle hire in Melbourne but I don't know that I'll get the opportunity to do it. Worth packing a helmet? Maybe. Whatever, the bikes and I will be taking to the road every day between then and now, revelling in the gentle, mild weather.

Having had Penelope now for a couple of months there's one thing about her that's a little annoying. The kickstand. It works fine, don't get me wrong. It does its job and holds the bike upright when it's asked to. But... the arrangement of cable along the frame above the kickstand means that unless you're careful you catch your toe in the cable when you deploy the kickstand. This is not an ideal arrangement and I'm going to drop the people at Pashley a note about it. Having tweaked the cable several times at first I'm now a lot more careful but I could see this becoming a safety issue for the unwary.